Mimicry is a lamp that imitates the color of objects. It consists of two individual and self contained objects — the lamp and the color sensing eye. When an object is placed against the eye, the color is captured and sent wirelessly to the lamp. The lamp gently shifts from its current color to the object’s newly captured color. In this way, the lamp adapts the ambient environment to express the object.

We created a simple but effective DIY color sensor, from spare available parts. A colored LED shines alternating red, blue, and green light out of the eye. The reflected light is measured with a light dependent resistor, and some computation is performed to derive the hue of the object.

Project created by Dean McNamee and Ishac Bertran at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design.